Gates Recommends Closing Prison at Guantanamo
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba _ Even with a first partial victory under the Pentagon’s belt, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that President Bush’s war-crimes court here lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
Moreover, in testimony to Congress, Gates repeated an earlier leaked recommendation to close the five-year-old offshore detention center _ and move the hardcore among the 385 or so captives here to the United States.
His comments, coupled with congressional staffers compiling a list of prospective stateside sites to jail war-on-terror captives, touched off a firestorm, in part because of the timing.
The U.S. is poised this week to win its first conviction at its first war-crimes tribunal since World War II, with a formal, detailed guilty plea expected today from long-held Australian captive David Hicks, 31, a soon-to-be self-confessed al-Qaida foot soldier.
“Because of things that happened earlier at Guantanamo, there is a taint about it,” Gates, who has been Pentagon chief for just three months, told a House committee. “It’s one of the reasons why I had recommended or pressed the issue of trying to get the trials moved to the United States.”
He urged Congress to search for a statutory solution to legally detain about 100 “hardcore” captives who would be too dangerous to let go.
“No matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials,” he said, “if they took place at Guantanamo, in the eyes of the international community, they would lack credibility.”
Gates testified at the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee as U.S. military officers here and at the Pentagon are scrambling to bring in up to 15 senior officers from around the globe to pass sentence on Hicks.
The one-time kangaroo skinner turned soldier-of-fortune agreed, in an about-face Monday, to plead guilty to providing material support for terrorism, for being in league with al-Qaida amid the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2002.
On Monday, the judge supervising Hicks’ trial disqualified his two civilian lawyers _ prompting critics to say Hicks was pleading out essentially to get home fast.
Under a long-standing diplomatic deal between the U.S. and Australia, war-on-terror allies, he will serve out his sentence in an Australian jail, described as far cushier than this rugged U.S. Navy outpost overlooking the Caribbean.
Hicks is expected to detail his crimes to the Marine colonel serving as judge at his military commission; then, afterward, lawyers will empanel five or more senior U.S. officers, mostly colonels or their equivalent, to pass sentence under the 2006 Military Commissions Act, adopted by Congress to restart the war court after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled an earlier version unconstitutional.
Thursday, the chief Pentagon prosecutor, Air Force Col. Moe Davis, defended the process to a group of Australian and U.S. reporters.
After Hicks admits to his crimes, under oath, Davis said, the prosecution would seek “substantially less” than the 20 years he had earlier described as appropriate _ since a similar foot-soldier, John Walker Lindh, received that sentence in a federal court plea deal.
The war court, he said, is not meant solely for “the big strategic thinkers that have carried out the deaths of thousands of people around the world. It’s also those tactical soldiers out on the front line that need to be held accountable.”
His comments came as Republicans circulated a House Armed Services Committee-generated list of cell space at 17 military prisons and brigs across the United States that could serve as holding cells for captives. Republicans seized on the list, vowing to oppose any efforts to close the camp.
“A good number of these terrorists held at Guantanamo have killed or threatened Americans,” said Florida Rep. Jeff Miller, a Republican whose district includes the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Pensacola made the list along with the Jacksonville Naval Air Station.
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(Rosenberg reported from Guantanamo; Clark from Washington.)
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